Plinth

In a 2012 episode of The Big Bang Theory, Dr. Rajesh Koothrappali buys a new iPhone 4S which comes with Apple’s new digital assistant, Siri. Raj has a selective mutism which prevents him from talking to women, rendering him perennially sexually frustrated. He can however talk to Siri and he develops a romantic bond to the AI—as Sheldon Cooper remarks, 'You’ve taken a great evolutionary leap, by abandoning human interaction and allowing yourself to romantically bond with a soulless machine. Kudos.' Later in the episode Raj dreams about going to Apple HQ to meet the real Siri, who has a woman’s body, and she says, 'If you’d like to make love to me, just tell me.' Alack, he cannot speak.

It is more than just a joke. In 2015, a study of 12,000 ‘Assistant.ai’ users showed that nearly half could imagine loving the app. While early versions of Siri had an unrealistic monotony, digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana, developed from the sexily sardonic assistant of Master Chief in the Halo video games, are distinctively sultry. While Raj’s computer fling was played for laughs, Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her imagined more realistic consequences to a lonely man’s life for his Operating System, as Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore falls head over pixelated heels for ‘Samantha’, voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

So now #OpenAI can work on visual recognition and relate it to emotional states. pic.twitter.com/fVGJBq55Ds

— Matt Capon (@MattLCapon) May 13, 2024

So realistic was Her that just over a decade later, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has brought ‘Samantha’ to (simulated) life. 'I like Her. The things Her got right—like the whole interaction models of how people use AI—that was incredibly prophetic', Altman said in an interview last year. On the day GPT-4o was launched, he tweeted just the word 'her'. One of the voices used for the AI, named ‘Sky, disturbed Johansson as being 'eerily similar' to her own voice. She had been invited to record for OpenAI and refused. While Altman denied similarity to Johansson’s tones, the voice was swiftly removed from the update. In a blog post, the company announced that it wants to develop 'a broadly beneficial social contract for content in the AI age'. Man is born free but is everywhere in digital chains.

It is manipulative for men like Altman to deny that AI development is not about sexual projection. GPT-4o and ‘Sky’ are merely attempts to create an ideal vocal feminine beauty who will only ever say what her male owner wants her to. Altman is a modern Pygmalion carving Galatea out of ivory, imploring Aphrodite to give human shape to his generated voice. He is like Coppelius in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story ‘The Sandman’, who crafts the homely figuration of love in a doll called Olympia to trick the eyes of young Nathaniel. The sense of horror people get from seeing and hearing deep-fake versions of themselves is just as Freud described in his essay ‘The Uncanny’ reflecting on Hoffmann’s tale. After Freud, AI women are an infantile wish-fulfilment, for children do not distinguish living and inanimate objects. It creates a realm of anxiety wherein one can no longer tell the difference between a real and an unreal woman. And why choose a real woman if the unreal one is better?

It creates an unsettling dissonance between image and voice. Think of the German actress Nikki van der Zyl, who dubbed the early Bond girls because the films’ producers determined her voice to be sexier than the actresses cast for their physical beauty. There is a haunting uniformity to those characters—at the end of Her, Theodore discovers that Samantha is talking to 8,316 other OS users. She claims to be in love with 641 of them. Theodore attempts to give Samantha a human body, calling on a volunteer willing to act as a physical vessel for the lovemaking between the ‘couple’, only for Theodore to find her corporeal form a pale reflection of the anatomical Samantha that lives in his mind.

In Blade Runner 2049, Ryan Gosling’s K has a fully-customisable hologram of his AI ‘Diji’, named Joi, whom he has customised to appear as Ana de Armas. When K comes home, Joi ‘walks’ into the room with a holographic dinner in her hand, dressed like a Madison Avenue-billboard version of 1950s American housewife, lights her man’s cigarette, and offers to read him Nabokov or dance. Later in the film Joi attempts a sexual encounter similar to that between Theodore and Samantha in Her, inviting a sex worker called Mariette as their fuckable puppet to give flesh and cunt to Joi’s unreal image. It is inevitably unsatisfying.

The story of the reclusive man who replaces women with a doll has become a staple of modern cinema, from 1987 rom-com Mannequin to 2007’s Lars and the Real Girl and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Air Doll in 2009. Charlie Kaufman’s 2015 animation Anomalisa draws a line between a vintage Japanese sex automaton and customer service expert Michael Stone’s sudden obsession with a woman called Lisa. Originally a play for voices, David Thewlis plays Michael while every character is voiced by Tom Noonan except for Lisa, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. As he starts to get to know her, the unique voice is damaged and starts to grate on Michael, the inevitable failure of a woman to be the ideal Pygmalion seeks.

'Why did you give her a sexuality?' Caleb asks of the scientist Nathan in Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina. His AI called Ava has a body, albeit one which only passes the Turing Test, i.e. it convinces Caleb it has consciousness, after it has been dressed to fully look like Alicia Vikander. The answer Nathan gives is because it’s fun, and for female consciousness to be convincing to a man she has to be fuckable (he has even given her a cyborg clitoris). But is the ability of an AI to experience pleasure essential to whether or not one could fall in love with it? Theodore’s job in Her is to write handwritten letters for people which are imbued with the linguistic conviction of love. People fall in love with (who they assume to be) real people on the internet through dating apps and forums all the time. As Sheldon says in The Big Bang Theory, perhaps falling in love with AI is the next step in human evolution.

The fear common to all of these examples is that men who fall in love with a voice alone find it harder to be satisfied with a women’s bodies in reality. As with pornography, they develop an idealised vision of a woman much like Pygmalion’s ivory statue which can never exist outside of their mind. What GPT-4o propagates is the insidious misogynistic belief of incel culture that a woman must exist just like Joi in Blade Runner 2049; fully customisable and completely subservient to her male owner. What Altman sees in Her as being prophetic of a positive future for men is in reality a dystopia for women. As these films show, there is only so much time before we are rendered obsolete by a newer, better, sexier model.

By Lillian Crawford